I don't feel that those are particularly difficult, it is just how to do it according to the Linux way. Actually, I have run into a lot harder things just in using the operating system, that is the part that makes me know that I'm really a novice. You've heard of being wet behind the ears...this is me:

On one hand, I'm glad that it is different than Windows, on the other I wish it were as easy to use. Then again, if it were, probably a lot more people would be using it, and the hackers and malware designers would refocus their target, and then the internet highway would be littered with penguin road kill.

Finally decided to use one of my 16GB drives and used unetbootin as we discussed, and all went according to plan, except one thing. The drive had a couple of folders on it that was going to take too long to just delete, so I ran the installation with them still on the drive, thinking that they would get removed by the reformatting that I thought that unetbootin would perform, but they didn't. This leaves me to think that this drive could do more than just install Linux, aand extra space could be used for simple storage.

Another thing that wasn't as expected, is that I only saw options to either run Kubuntu with or without installing it, but nothing that looked like it would simply repair the old installation, so I had it install Kubuntu again, and it now appears to be fully functional.

Not certain if I will attempt to store other files on the drive, but the most space that it would permit me to set for persistence was 9GBs. When viewing the drive from Windows, it shows only 4.3GBs used, and 9.99GBs free. so I guess that the 9GBs set for persistance didn't fully reserve the space allotted to it.

I guess that I got too used to SuSe, because it does...at least it has a fail safe option, along with some other repair functions. As long as I don't have a lot invested in terms of time, setting up the system, I guess it doesn't really matter though.

I guess that I got too used to SuSe, because it does...at least it has a fail safe option, along with some other repair functions. As long as I don't have a lot invested in terms of time, setting up the system, I guess it doesn't really matter though.

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openSUSE and Suse have something similar to a restore feature yes, but it only partially works. there are tools to get the packages onto a USB though.

That's rather comforting to hear. Now I can just tell myself that when the repair didn't work for me that it was the repair function's fault, instead of mine. When you say that there are tools to get the packages onto USB, am I to understand that you are speaking of tools for repairing the system? Are those tools designed only for specific distros, or will they work with any of them?

I found a little on Grub Repair tools, but they are listed as being for Ubuntu. As far as I know, the only difference between that and Kubuntu, is that the latter has KDE, whereas Ubuntu has Gnome. Should I think that such a tool, or for that matter, anything else designed for Ubuntu, other than the desktop would work in either distro? Actually, if Kubuntu is anything like SuSe, it would probably work with either desktop.

Hmm, from a quick scan of the downoad page for it, I get the impression that one would download it and put it on USB, etc. That raises the question of whether it would have to be bootable, like with the Kubuntu distro that we just did? If so, I would probably have to sacrifice another USB drive for it, because I'll bet there is no way to put a boot menu on a flash drive, so that either are available.

If I understood, I got the impression that the Ubuntu Grub repair was something performed from a Live CD operation, which acquired the boot repair via the internet, so that they worked together, rather than individually.

Yes all USB images have to be made bootable, otherwise the BIOS/UEFI wont see it. And for the ubuntu grub rescue I would think it would work with Kubuntu as they are esentially the same and only what comes preinstalled is different. But yes you may have to sacrifice another USB or burn another disc. When you burned your last disk what tool did you use?

By disc, are you referring to the software I burned the DVD with, or that used to create the bootable USB? If the former, it was Imgburn and with the latter unetbootin. I will have to repeat the USB setup, because I learned after using 13.04, that the latest version just released is 13.10. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with them.

No you wont have to burn a new image, you can just upgrade on Kubuntu. Its easy to do with no command line involved. But the command itself is still very simple and you can copy and paste this command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and then: sudo update-manager -d

its that simple As for disk burner yes i was referring to the tool you used to burn disks, the tool you used imgeburn is okay but sometimes tools like that dont work too well on burning .iso files. The best free one and the one that ubuntu recommends is http://infrarecorder.org/, a very handy burning tool for any distro (its not ubuntu speciffic). Just watch those burning speeds, the slower you can burn the better. I know these days many say the faster the better but not with .iso image burning, it often makes coasters with that method. Its why I use USB drives, if you need more in the fuuture you can buy morer, these days they can be found real cheap and are a better investment then burning dvd's or CD's

Msybe I should have used a CD, rather than a DVD, because the slowest that it would let me burn to it was 8x. Considering the problems I had with the last DVD, I think I will try using infrarecorder on the next attempt.

Msybe I should have used a CD, rather than a DVD, because the slowest that it would let me burn to it was 8x. Considering the problems I had with the last DVD, I think I will try using infrarecorder on the next attempt.

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Yeah I have seen that happen myself, just make sure you have a higher capacity CD next round (all Ubuntu flavors need more then 700MB of room, they do make 800MB CD's)